“I’ve been here now for some days, groping my way along, trying to realize my vision here. I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. I’ve come to find out that it’s not the vision, it’s not the vision at all. It’s the groping. It’s the groping, it’s the yearning, it’s the moving forward. I think Kierkegaard said it oh so well, ‘The self is only that which it’s in the process of becoming.‘ Art? Same thing. The thing I learned folks, this is absolutely key: It’s not the thing you fling. It’s the fling itself.”
From Northern Exposure, Season 3, Episode 12 “Burning down the house”. The clip is on youtube above….but a part of the speech has been cut out for some reason. If you want to see a piano get flung through the air, then have a look.
The episode was written by Robin Green, who was an executive producer for The Sopranos. Another creator of the Sopranos, David Chase, also wrote for NX, but was quoted as hating of the optimism and cheesiness of Northern Exposure, “It was ramming home every week the message that life is nothing but great…” (Chase quoted in: Lavery & Thompson; 2002, 2). Nevertheless i think some interesting concepts have managed to slip past the filter of the ‘culture machine’.
This episode deals primarily with Chris’s attempt to ‘create a pure moment’ by flinging a cow using a trebuchet.
“You see Shelly – what I’m dealing with is the aesthetics of the transitory. I’m creating tomorrow’s memories - and as memeories my images are as immortal as art – which is concrete.”
Chris later learns that the flinging of a cow has occured – in a Monty Python film – and he becomes disheartened, citing ‘repetition is the death of art’. But when a fire destroys Maggie O’connel’s house (played by the delicious super babe Janine Turner, below), Chris is gifted a burnt piano to destroy.
(Janine, if i could go back in time, it would be for you, when you were still supple and short haired.)
So what does the actual flinging of a piano represent?
When Chris is dragging a log down main street for part of the trebuchet, there is an obvious allusion to Jesus carrying the cross.
In creating the trebuchet, Chris is creating an event, an element stretched over following ones that forms an infinite series that contains “neither a final term, nor a limit.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). Later in the fourth season the trebuchet is re-used to fling the coffin of a deceased friend of Chris.
This ’stretching’ of the event over time is also apparent in Christ’s crucifixion. Rather than his death being the limit of compassion, of ’god’s love’, the event is repeated both symbolically in the form of the cross and relgious services, and also by Catholic Flagellents in New Mexico, who actually crucify themselves (not to death, however).
Both Chris’ strive to fling a cow and Christ’s death include what Deleuze names as the third component of the event – the individual – which comes to represent “creativity, the formation of a New.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). To Chris, a character obesessed with the creation of his own becomings, the event is symbolic of his own “groping around in the dark”. For Jesus, it wasn’t the death that mattered, moreso the act of dying. Crucifixion, which is a slow and public death, suits this purpose perfectly. If Jesus had been guillotined, or shot, or thrown off a cliff, the transitory nature of the dying body would not have lasted long enough to me remembered. To be on the cross is to be in the becoming state between life and death. It thus served to create the death of Jesus as an event. And even the final death and entombment became the opportunity for another becoming – the ressurection.
The trebuchet fling is an event crafted by Chris to create ‘tomorrow’s memories’, to create a social participation that will likely outlast his own physical embodiment. In his strive to create the authentic, he is striving to create something original, something individual that demonstrates his own personal becomings.
Whilst the final scene of the episode is collective, in that it focuses on a group’s perception of the piano fling, it also has seperate reaction shots of each main character uttering a catchphrase when the piano hits the ground – to deploy Althusser’s term – demonstrating their own interpellation, which puts aside the loyalties of the group. (Althusser in Bauman; 2000, 97).
Ed: “neat”
Joel: “that’s interesting”
Maggie: “nice”
Maurice: “well i’ll be…”
Chris: “yeah”
This becomes more clear when we consider that the subplot of the episode is about the loss of a house, but perhaps the re-territorialization of home - the grasping of the identity which we carry with us “like snails carry their homes on their backs.” (Bauman; 2000, 98).
Maggie loses her posessions, but is visited by her Mother. The chimney-sweep who is hiding from his failed golfing career is taught to re-capture his fame by Dr. Fleischman. And Chris, who temporarily loses his ability to create, regains it by flinging a piano through the air with a resounding CLANG of self affirmation.
Posted by igetlifted 